Survival, Growth and the Erosion of Character in a High Security Prison

• In Event: The Impact of Punishment on Character and Agential Capacity

Abstract

In Reforming Punishment, Craig Haney illustrates the many ‘situational pathologies’ created by harsh prison conditions and the destructive legacies they create. He writes powerfully against the ‘flawed logic’ that lies at the heart of worsening prison conditions in supermax prisons in the US, describing the impact of these depriving environments on individual identity and emotional range. He outlines the dysfunctional and damaging social climate created when staff and prisoners are subjected to dehumanising penal policies. A problematic set of ideological beliefs encourage this extremely depriving and ‘soul destroying’ climate, creating cruelty and a destructive set of interpersonal dynamics between prisoners and staff, and destructive interactions between prisoners and ‘the system’. His analysis is applicable to a form of long-term high security imprisonment emerging in England and Wales, in the light of a series of major escapes, a rising fear of terrorism, and the imposition of increasing and indeterminate sentence lengths on young men. The new ‘ecology of cruelty’ drives out trust, hope and meaning, leads to increased fear and violence, and precipitates new and complex uses of faith identities by prisoners. This paper outlines the psychological and sociological conditions of imprisonment in this new climate, and describes some of prisoners’ strategies for survival, growth and change in the face of institutionalised threats and erosions to moral character.

Author

• Alison Liebling, Cambridge University